Because reality is beautiful.

My last self-discovery blog for a while, I swear.

So the other night, my wife and I stayed up late talking. First, we talked about the choice I make everyday to ride my bike to work or not. Usually I do ride it, which means that I ride 6 to 7 miles there, then back at the end of the day. I don’t always, I had a touch of sun stroke today and asked my wife to pick me up. The 0630 ride being a good deal more comfortable than the afternoon one.

Choice is funny, though. When I lived in Kansas City I lived significantly closer to my job, but I refused to ride a bike. We desperately needed money, yet I insisted on driving my car the 3 miles to work everyday. Now, we don’t really need the money and I ride. When we don’t feel like things are being forced upon us, it is so much more personally rewarding to do them. So then we began discuss the failings that we were having at that time.

I guess I thought I was entitled to car. So I had a car. We lived about 2 miles from a grocery store, and about three miles from work. We had no reason whatsoever for a car, yet I had a full sized pickup, which got about 12 mpg. I had an apartment. And I had debt. Up to my eyeballs.

I look back, and what I should have done is soooo obvious. I should have moved in with my parents. I should have gotten a job working nights in Des Moines. I could have rode into work with my dad. I wouldn’t have needed a car, and my room and board would have been about $100 dollars a month. I could have paid down my debt, then began to save. Within a year or two we would have been OK. During that time we could be searching for the perfect place in Des Moines to live. But we didn’t. We were too proud. Of what I am not sure. The image that we could take care of ourselves, I guess. I say image, because obviously we could not take care of ourselves, we were making one crappy decision after another.

But why were we there in the first place? I had failed college. Was this my fault? Absolutely, and at the same time no. I really did do my best at the classes I had been assigned (it wasn’t good enough). However, I didn’t choose my classes. I blindly accepted that whatever the nice lady told me to take, I should take. I didn’t know my limitations and I couldn’t be bothered to learn them. (This leads to one of my favorite quotes [which is on my facebook page as well as other blogs]: If you insist on being an ignorant ass, you will be consistently rewarded with failure. You have no right to decide the performance of something you cannot be bothered to understand.) I did my best at classes that I did my worst to chose. I wouldn’t trust a cell phone salesman to tell me what I need. I wouldn’t trust a car salesman to tell me what I need. Yet I trusted a complete stranger to sell me an education.

Then, to top it all off, I did something really, really sick. When I failed out, I blamed God, but not blamed God in a manly, angry way. No, I blamed God in a sort of half-assed wussy way. I said that it was his will. That he called me out of college to minister to the church in Kansas City.

My brother in law is a radical believer. He yells at people who say that God lead him smoke pot, get drunk, and punch strangers so that His glory could be revealed. He says “God didn’t give me a great testimony. God saved me from my testimony. What sort of God would beat me up just to look cool?”

In similar path to being saved from your testimony he had this to say:

“Believe with your heart in power of God to change things, but work your ass off to change them.”

So, this blog becomes yet another midnight confessional. Oddly, even though everyone reads this, this is just for me:

I accept full responsibility for my failures. No devil made me do it. No “will-of-God” bologna. No “the-sin-of-X-was-controlling-my-life” BS. Nope. One person failed Israel Walker. And that person was Israel Walker.